learning from data

Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.

An LGR Oddware episode looking at Sony's MDH-10 MD Data drive from 1995, which used MiniDisc for computer storage years before Hi-MD. The host tries out the drive with its original drivers and software.

A five-minute lightning demo of VisiData, a terminal tool for exploring and manipulating data. It uses two months of NYC 311 complaint data to drill down, plot points on a virtual map and save selected rows.

The first episode of Google's Machine Learning Recipes series. It introduces machine learning and builds a first supervised-learning classifier in about six lines of Python using scikit-learn.

Mark Rober and Jabril build an app that uses machine learning to decode baseball sign sequences. The video also explains neural networks in a simple, accessible way.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a short tour of a Google data center. He covers security, sustainability and the core infrastructure architecture.

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

A short Tesla promotional video touring the company's Crash Lab. It describes using data from the fleet and replicated real-world crash scenarios to engineer vehicle safety.

Kevin Fang comically retells GitLab's 2017 incident in which an engineer deleted the production database, based on the company's postmortems. It walks through the confusion and failed backups.

Fox Business interview in which Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison claims Oracle will beat Amazon at cloud databases. He argues the world's valuable data lives in Oracle and says Amazon struggled to move off it.

Afroman's music video for a song about police damaging his door, built from home security footage of an officers' raid on his house.

Andrej Karpathy's Databricks talk on Software 2.0, the shift from human-written code to code produced by neural network training. It covers how developer work moves toward curating datasets, the advantages and challenges, and opportunities for new tooling.

3Blue1Brown's first chapter on deep learning explains what neurons and layers are and the math underlying a basic neural network, using handwritten digit recognition with visual animations.

A short smartphone-recorded clip from a 2014 event in Paris where DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis presents an AI learning to play old Atari games. The system learns from only the video signal and the score. Audio quality is poor.

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.

Tom Scott, who never learned to ride a bike, gets lessons from Mike Boyd, a YouTuber known for learning skills quickly. The video follows an adult's attempt to learn cycling in a short time.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

A More Perfect Union report on xAI's data center in Memphis, which residents say burns gas without permits or pollution controls and harms their health.

A scene from Moneyball in which Brad Pitt's character argues with scouts who pick players on intangible impressions instead of performance data. It is a four-minute clip.

An animated ranking of the most popular programming languages from 1965 to 2019, built from popularity indexes, GitHub access data and historical surveys.

Veritasium debunks the idea of learning styles, such as being a visual learner, with an interview with Daniel Willingham and a memory experiment. It argues that a multimodal approach helps everyone.

Chris Lonsdale presents a TEDx talk on how adults can learn a language in about six months, centering on immersion, comprehensible input and a practical learning methodology.

3Blue1Brown's third deep learning chapter gives a visual, intuitive account of backpropagation and what happens to a neural network as it learns. A follow-up video covers the underlying calculus.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A five-minute SuperMemo demo of incremental reading: importing a Wikipedia article on nutrition, extracting passages, making cloze deletions and finishing the item. It lists the keyboard shortcuts used.

The official music video for A$AP Mob's Yamborghini High featuring Juicy J, known for heavy datamoshing and glitch effects with hue shifting.

Tony Heller argues that US thermometer data shows a century of cooling and that NOAA adjusts the record to produce a warming trend.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the tension between public and private weather forecasting, including NOAA data and AccuWeather's lobbying against free public weather data.

SethBling shows MarI/O, a program using neural networks and the NEAT genetic algorithm to learn to play Super Mario World. The description links the source code, the paper and background reading.

Veritasium explains that the Higgs boson accounts for only a small fraction of everyday mass. Most of a proton's mass comes from the energy of the gluon field binding its quarks.

Destin of Smarter Every Day learns to ride a bicycle whose steering is reversed, taking about eight months, and compares it with how his young son learned much faster. It illustrates knowledge versus understanding and brain plasticity in adults versus children.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

Sal Khan of Khan Academy argues that schools push students forward with gaps in their foundations, and that students should instead master concepts at their own pace. He compares it to building a house on an unfinished foundation.

Two Minute Papers covers OpenAI's multi-agent hide-and-seek experiment, in which agents learned emergent tool use and found ways to break the game's rules. It summarizes the 'Emergent Tool Use from Multi-Agent Interaction' paper.